A week is a long time in athletics, as Harold Wilson's marginally more ripped brother used to say. But having left for my holidays with the papers full of "Dwain Chambers: I've moved on" headlines, and returned to ones revealing the sprinter was working with Victor Conte, I assumed the plane had passed through some tear in the space-time continuum and it was 2003 again.

As mentioned, I fortunately missed the serialisation of Dwain's book, though am given to understand that in its ability to push the economy off the front pages, to veer between melodrama and low farce, and to provoke demented calls for polygraph tests and private prosecutions, it was fairly typical of most British sporting autobiographies. You'd clearly have needed a cocktail of banned substances to last the distance, and a weary Guardian poll asked if everyone should just get off Dwain's back. 80% of respondents said they should.

We can only speculate how those same supporters reacted when within 48 hours of the poll closing, it was revealed that Dwain had once more teamed up with Balco breakout star Victor Conte. Perhaps it was with the same fond exasperation exhibited by OJ Simpson supporters when the old boy opted to pen a book entitled If I Did It. Perhaps it was with the same imperceptible sigh I imagine the heroic human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith gives when yet another shackled client explains they were merely holidaying in Afghanistan. Given that nobody died in the Chambers scenario, however, the reaction of the 80% was probably more akin to that of Pamela Anderson's mother as her daughter wept that her second sex tape had been leaked. Namely: you don't do yourself any favours, do you, love?

Whatever the reasons behind this reunion, Chambers is finally doing his sport a valuable service. He is keeping Victor Conte in the public eye, which is precisely where that tellingly indestructible character belongs until athletics makes considerably more progress in cleaning itself up.

It is never really clear how deeply the IAAF's heart is in this task – I see the sport's governing body will be spending this coming weekend having a meeting to determine whether Chambers's book has brought athletics into disrepute – a debate that rests on the assumption that it has a reputation to defend.

But now Chambers has given Conte, who supplied a slew of athletes with performance-enhancing drugs, a comeback in his ongoing soap opera, it is once again impossible to ignore this pencil-moustachioed chancer in a slightly-too-loud sports jacket, and everything he represents. In Conte are distilled all the uncomfortable truths about the problem that continually threatens to destroy the credibility of athletics. Once a self-styled holistic guru, he exemplifies the continuum between suspiciously fringe ideas about "nutrition" and illegal enhancement. He remains depressingly able to blind athletes with pseudoscience and claims that all sorts of newfangled machines are tomorrow's world. He was a former bass player with no medical or scientific background. And still he beat the system.

The most teeth-grindingly humiliating aspect for the fight against doping was always how amateur Conte's former operation was. Back when the Balco investigation broke, people used to reading of this mysterious facility called the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative must have imagined imposing premises. In fact, Balco was just one of a parade of small shop fronts in a suburban strip mall. It wasn't quite in good enough repair to be a Kinko's, but is probably now occupied by a fried chicken outlet on first-name terms with environmental health.

And master of all he surveyed was Conte, a braggart for whom the designation "small-time crook" might have been invented. Explaining his loyalty to Conte, Chambers is not wholly prosaic. "It's like in The Matrix when Morpheus meets Neo and offers him the red or blue pill," he says. "The blue pill would make life carry on as normal while the red would answer the questions of the Matrix. Victor never once forced me down this road."

So there you have it: Dwain as the Chosen One and Victor as Laurence Fishburne – although you may judge it is athletics that has been given the bitter pill to swallow. We appear to be in the Conte Reloaded stage at present, and as viewers of that diminishing movie series will know, this one's going to go on. Conte Revolutions? Steel yourself. After all, as Victor says of his new altitude-simulator-cum-nutrition programme: "This is the future."